Envisioning Taiwan
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Conclusion From Nation to Dissemi-Nation: Postmodern Hybridization and Changing Conditions for the Representation of Identity The portrait of Taiwan that ultimately emerges from Hou Hsiao-hsi ﬁlms departs signiﬁcantly from earlier, more conventional formulat of the island’s nationhood—both from the kmt government’s his cal attempts to integrate Taiwan into a larger Chinese nation and f the nostalgic rural vision of the island imagined by Hwang Chun-m and his fellow hsiang-t’u writers of the 1970s. Indeed, it would be ﬁcult, if not impossible, to trace in Hou’s ﬁlms the outlines of Tai as an organic, uniﬁed, and stable entity whose cultural parameters readily deﬁnable. Instead, they paint a picture of the island as an incr ingly complex and hybrid social space, an ever-changing formation is continually being shaped and reshaped by the multiple languages, tures, social classes, and value systems with which it comes into con Unlike his hsiang-t’u predecessors, Hou’s constructions of a Taiwa imagined community go beyond merely offering a nativist narrativ nation to counterbalance the Kuomintang’s rhetoric of Chinese ho geneity and coherence. Rather, they question the very possibility of tinuing to deﬁne a native or authentic Taiwanese cultural identity aga a foreign other, whether that be the Japanese, mainland Chinese, or w erners. By simultaneously evoking and undermining the polar binari of classical nationalism, Hou challenges the essentialist rhetoric braced by the earlier nativism of hsiang-t’u literature—a strategic rea ment that moves Taiwan toward a more flexible and meaningful posi in the arena of global culture by recognizing that today’s world of m dimensional and multidirectional cultural flows demands acknowl ment of the myriad differences found within societies—and even wi individuals—rather than just between them. His ﬁlms foreground